I know these monkeys. Not personally - I know of them. I know they made their way into Metal Gear Solid 3 and Little Big Planet in one form or another, and I know they come from the Ape Escape series - but I've no idea what that series is actually about, other than capturing escaping primates.
The only title from the series to make the 1001 list is the first, and I suspect that the reason for its inclusion is not for the plot, which we'll get to soon enough, but for the fact that this is the first game to require players to own a controller capable of, and then use dual analogue controls on a home console (better slip that caveat in there to cover my arse in case an arcade title got their first...) - a controller configuration that I, for one, have been using for 20 years now, across multiple console generations.
I've certainly used the now-standard PlayStations' controller then, but have never played Ape Escape. I'm not expecting the greatest use of analogue controls in video game history, but I am expecting plenty of monkeys. Let's see what we end up with.
Fun Times
You've never seen colour so bright as in the intro movie to Ape Escape. A monkey named Specter, I believe, finds himself in the possession of a hat that vastly increases his mental capacity, which enables him to plan to take over the world with his monkey friends/slaves - not quite sure what they are yet, other than goofy looking.
Meanwhile, two friends, Spike and Jake, are racing to a laboratory of some sort in the hopes of being able to travel through time. No, really. Like it's an everyday occurrence or something.
Instead, they find the Professor and Natalie tied up, and their time machine about to be tested by monkeys, which would probably be alright (ignoring ethics and whatnot), were it not for the fact that these monkeys are being coerced into taking over the world by an evil monkey, no doubt wanting to travel back in time to stop humans from becoming the dominant species.
Makes sense.
In scenes reminiscent of Half-Life, the time machine glows colours you thought weren't possible to see, and it seems you're getting brought along for the ride.
And he we are, in the time of dinosaurs, trying to catch monkeys with stun-batons and time travel nets, or something, because capturing them and sending them back through time to where they came from is the only way to solve this problem.
Alrighty then, Professor, let's catch some monkeys.
Like Zelda before it, your items are mapped to the face buttons, but unlike Zelda, pressing the buttons will only switch you over to that item. To use it requires the waggling of the right analogue stick, the inputs matching (roughly) the direction in which Spike will swing his stun-baton or swipe his net.
This means the jump button is mapped to R1, and you will probably already be thinking of how annoying that might become when you've got decades of 'Press X to jump' stuck in your muscle memory.
A number of monkeys are scattered about around the level, and your first task is to catch just three of them. You can just run along and hope your net lands on target, but you'll probably want to thwack them with the stun-baton first, which knocks them down for a second or so, allowing you the briefest of windows to switch over to your net and finish the job.
Meet your quota and you can progress, first back into a hub world and then into the next stage, though at this early point of the game we're already informed that we're not going to go into the Primordial Ooze to catch more monkeys until we've proven we can use the underwater net device thing.
Functioning as a scuba tank, an underwater jet ski and a net launcher, this fancy gadget means monkeys won't escape on land or sea, providing we learn how the analogue sticks work.
Even today, they are instances where the L3 and R3 buttons are so unknown that their use boggles players' brains, but here it is, in the first game to require their use: an instructional message about pushing the sticks in like a button.
Back to saving the world, then, and we've another level to find some monkeys in, and this one shows off the time period we're in some more with dinosaurs and drizzle. Spike can shimmy up trees and there are all kinds of golden triangles that you can collect. I don't know what for - I only care for monkeys, and there's four of them that need to be introduced to my net.
Three of them were fine. The fourth...
Frustrations
Holy smokes was this bastard causing me no end of problems. You can't stun monkeys underwater, but you can chase them down and net them, but no matter how many times I pressed R1, no monkey was caught. He kept swimming away like an arse, leaving me to look a right fool in the process.
Minutes were spent here, by the way, and this was only five minutes or so after a tutorial level teaching me about the underwater net in the first place, but nothing was happening and I was getting annoyed to the point of having to consult the Internet...
... where I learn that the button I want is actually - ironically - R3.
I had fumbled my way through the training level to the point of not actually knowing what I pressed or remembering what I read. Evidentally, I must have pressed R3 back then, and only needed to press R3 right now.
Final World
While a busier life these days halted my progress at this early stage, I made sure to save(state) my progress in order to come back, because while it's not a looker and seems an awful lot like a platforming collect 'em up, I was at least somewhat interested in seeing what else it offered.
Clearly, I'm not missing much in terms of the plot. Nothing substantial about the state of the world is going to be said in Ape Escape, is it? The gameplay presumably branches out and gets more involved as time goes on - there are some unused face buttons at this early stage, so I'd bet they get filled in with items and tools as the game progresses.
I don't know where it will end up, and I'm scratching my head wondering how there are so many titles in the series if it's 'just catching monkeys', which probably means it's either a) not about 'just catching monkeys' or b) is really bloody good at simulating how to catch monkeys.
Whatever the case, all this waffling doesn't stop Ape Escape from being a game that won't get a lot of attention, but should at least get a little. It's bold for a game to demand the use of a specific piece of hardware and then succeed in its use. You can make the case that the controller was more successful than the game that needed it, fair enough, but props to the developers for making their mark in history.
It probably didn't teach people how to play games as well as Mario might have done, but Ape Escape now means much more to me than its monkeys.
I've hardly talked about the monkeys! They're awesome monkeys. Best video game monkeys, easy. Gonna make my top ten on that alone, just you wait.
Fun Facts
Ape Escape was remade as a launch title for the PlayStation Portable, which is remarkable when you remember that the PSP only had one analogue stick.
Ape Escape, developed by SCE Japan Studio, first released in 1999.
Version played: PlayStation, 1999, via emulation.